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Jake Seelye, part of the TLC Creative Presentation Design Team and Showsite GFX Lead, created this mini Halloween themed PowerPoint movie!

Halloween is a favorite holiday for my family, so I was thrilled to be asked to create a Halloween themed animation using only PowerPoint for this year. One of my favorite memories around this time of year was when my friends and I would go to Knott’s Scary Farm and experience all the haunted houses and mazes.

Click play and turn on sound!

Haunted houses are certainly iconic for this holiday, and this was the inspiration behind this animation. First, I found a fun haunted mansion style stock art, along with some clouds in the background, to setup the main art and focal point of the animation:

PowerPoint’s amazing Morph transition was then used to zoom into the house, keeping the elements of the background as separate graphics to create a subtle “parallax effect.”

The seamless animation that morph provides worked well to give the feeling of walking up to an old creepy house on top of a hill. The screen capture above highlights how thinking “outside the slide” when setting up Morph animations is needed to create cinematic effects.

The next scene was the most complex, as there were many moving parts to create a fun cinematic visual animation. The lightning and simultaneous flashes of the environment here were created using simple PPT animations and graphic editing. The lightning bolts themselves were setup using “Wipe Down” and set to be quick, much like actual lightning. The “lit up” landscape was created by adding in a duplicate background graphic over the top of the house, with the brightness and contrast turned up quite a bit to simulate how lightning lights up the land around it.

A small but fun detail of this scene is the Jack-O-Lantern on the porch, with the “Pulse” animation on the eyes and mouth to make them appear to glow and flicker, set to repeat until the next slide/scene.

Finally, to add to the eerie atmosphere, I added some fall leaves to blow through the scene, using motion paths, and duplicating them while randomizing the timing:

This is a lot of animations and elements on one slide, all for about 8 seconds of actual animation, which really makes you appreciate the real animation artists out there who make full 2-hour animated films.

The final act of the animation features a Witch soaring into the skies above the haunted mansion and creating a “Happy Halloween” visual across the starlit background. The first part of this was achieved with morph once again, as a way to move from the mansion background to the starry sky background, in an upwards motion, and to also move the Witch across the screen as if she was flying.

Almost counterintuitive is the animation pane on this slide is empty, but the slide is full of animation (Morph transition at work).

Finally, the Happy Halloween ending was created using a motion path for the witch, and a “wipe right” animation for the letters, as if the Witch were creating the greeting with her magical broom.

And that’s it! With some time, trial and error, and creative usage of PowerPoint’s animation tools, you can actually create pretty fun movie without ever having to leave PowerPoint!

-Jake